by Zach Kincaid
Charles Finney wrote, “If there is a decay of conscience, the pulpit is responsible for it. If the public press lacks moral discrimination, the pulpit is responsible for it. If the church is degenerate and worldly, the pulpit is responsible for it. If the world loses its interest in religion, the pulpit is responsible for it. If Satan rules in our halls of legislation, the pulpit is responsible for it. If our politics become so corrupt that the very foundations of our government are ready to fall away, the pulpit is responsible for it." (1873)
I am wet with preacher spit: water and peppermint. I sit and sit, waiting for something spirited, but an ego ten stories high is sadly all I get. I feel talked down as you condescend from your mountain of illustrations and other charades that dance like shadows on some vacated cave.
If there is no theology and no instruction from Scripture then fixing up a stage instead of an altar, liturgical or contemporary, goes nowhere. It's simply rooted to the wind of driveled speech. You're digging in rocky terrain, preacher. You like to hear yourself pontificate each Sunday in a 1-2-3 whip of ease when the real work of expositing the word goes undone. Do you even know the names of your people? You turn the stories of Jesus, the prophets, and the saints in on us. You shove them off a cliff where there is no cleft to hide in. We will die here.
Oh, yes, right now we'll help you gloat and bloat your buildings to fit your head (and ours) inside. But there is certain gout that makes gospel feet slow to move, minds unable to learn, hearts uneasy toward discipline in God’s ways and words. He said, “Come and follow me and let the dead bury their dead.” Instead, we worry, toil, and develop ways to bleed ourselves into appealing colors rather than stand in the fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins. Why? Because that is no draw at all nor does it create a cult of personality.
We are God's handiwork created for good works in Christ. Without instruction from the brothers and sisters who open the scrolls, we are churned up into the vomit of today’s siren songs - dishonesty, selfishness, fear. Without a community of real, in-person bodies in a solid place called “sanctuary”, we are on the borderlands of appealing to a new nature of a new normal, one that governs insane asylums and not a garden named Gethsemene.
We forget our time is always almost up, that the last days are here. Remember what he said. "Take and eat; take, drink. Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day."